Vanilla & Cocoa Butter Lip Balm Recipe

Vanilla and Cocoa Butter lip balm recipe

Wow…this is probably one of the best lip balm recipes I’ve created in a long while. Incredibly simple to make, it tastes of vanilla and chocolately cocoa butter and leaves your lips feeling soft and shiny.

The project only needs about a half hour of your time and a few gorgeous, natural ingredients – convenient links to order what you need online are provided below. The recipe will make you up to 10 tubes of lip balm or five of the little pots. Enough to treat yourself and your friends.

Lip Balms are a crafty combo of solid & liquid oils

One of the easiest beauty products you can make is lip balm and I should know since I make thousands of them as part of my business. Lip balms are a combination of liquid and solid oils that when melted together will create a product that is softer than the hard oils used and harder than the liquid oils. The ratio of these is what is you play with to get the right consistency.

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When you get those right then you can add aroma, colour, and antioxidants (like Vitamin E) to make the product taste and look nicer.

Vanilla Cocoa Lip Balm

makes approx 10 lip balm tubes (4.5ml) or 5 pots (10ml)

The recipe below is measured by weight and if you want to be exact please use a digital kitchen scale – I highly recommended these for those who wish to make any kind of beauty product.

Otherwise, you can probably eyeball this recipe by using 1 part beeswax, 2 parts cocoa butter, and 3 parts sweet almond oil*. Also, the links to ingredients below will provide a lot more than you will need for a single batch. However, they’re the smallest and best-value amounts that I could find on Amazon for you.

* If you have an allergy to almonds use another light liquid oil like grapeseed oil or sunflower oil. Also, I opted to infuse my oil with chamomile flowers which is entirely optional for this recipe. Chamomile has natural anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties which make it great for damaged skin (think sunburn, chapped lips, or recovering from cold sores). To create an oil infusion visit this page for more info. In this recipe I cold-oil-infused 120g of sweet almond oil with 2 teaspoons of dried chamomile flowers.

** Do not use vanilla flavoring meant for cooking. It’s water based and will just separate in your recipe. Oil and water don’t mix!

Step 1: Melt the oils

Place the beeswax, cocoa butter, and sweet almond oil into a a small pan – if you have one with a sauce-pouring spout then even better! Melt the oils gently using the double-boiler method: float the pan with oils inside a pan filled with boiling water. This insures that the oils melt evenly and don’t get too hot.

Step 2: Add the additional ingredients and pour

Add the flavor oil and vitamin e oil and stir well. When I make lip balms I use a bamboo skewer to mix since it doesn’t pick up too much of the oil. Put a cold spoon in the oil and a lot of the lip balm will ‘stick’ to it when you take the spoon out.

When mixed thoroughly, pour the oil into the lip balm containers which should be sterile when they arrive from the supplier. I advise warming the pot style containers in the oven until they’re warm to the touch. This will ensure that the lip balm doesn’t leave ‘drag marks’ on the sides as it cools. Make sure you don’t leave them in the oven too long though or they’ll melt.

Step 4: Cool and label

Leave the lip balms to cool naturally on the counter with the lids off – they’ll take an hour or two to cool completely. When they are completely room temperature you can put the lids on. If you put them on before then, you could get condensation under the lids and you don’t want that.

Label the tubes by wrapping paper around them and glueing/taping. A handwritten label makes it even more personal.

The lip balms should be used by the nearest expiry date of the ingredients you use. Generally 1-2 years.

12 Discussion to this post

Hi Tanya, thank you for this lovely recipe! I really want to try this myself. Just a quick question: how come you need to add a preservative like Geogard Ultra in face lotion but not in lip balm? Thank you!!

Hi Gina and lovely to hear from you! Preservatives are only required in recipes (including food products) that have a water content and need to have a shelf-life. Bacteria and pathogens grow in wet environments so you need to protect your food and beauty items by using a preservative. Lip balms don’t require them because there’s no water in them. Hope this helps 🙂

Hi Irene! The recipe is tried and tested and is actually more on the hard side than soft. It’s possible that your digital kitchen scale isn’t functioning properly. Try again making extra sure that your ingredients and measurements are correct. I’d maybe try to get a hold of another scale as well.

Hi there, I just discovered your blog in doing research to make my own products. I love it! I have been making balms but I have found that the cocoa butter sets “blistery” which gives it a rough looking texture and feel. It dissolves just like the rest of the ingredients when you rub it but it looks and feels funny. Do you have any idea what causes this to happen? Thank you in advance!

Do you mean a gritty texture? That’s common with some butters but you can reduce the chance of it happening by heating your butter (before you add the other oils) to 175F and holding it for 20-30 minutes. Cool your balms quickly too by placing them in the refrigerator.